After six days of increasingly acrimonious debate and discussion, he announced the dramatic news to the world, insisting that the weapons were removed and imposing a naval blockade to prevent more coming in. Threaded together are close-up character portraits and big picture analysis, military collisions and accounts of the social, political forces that dictated decisions. On the other side Khrushchev had to actually keep Castro in the dark due to his obsession with fighting the Americans, the Soviet leader thought that Castro didn't actually understand what nuclear war meant. The author describes the discovery and naming of new lands and the work of the scientists gathering specimens.

Na maioria dos registos históricos, a crise dos misseis de cuba é vista como um desafio que a união soviética lançou ao mundo ocidental que se não tivesse sido combatido na origem, talvez tivesse pervertido de modo irremediável o “equilíbrio pacífico” entre nações. The commandant’s inexperienced, often unruly crew, half non-Belgian, included scientists, a rookie engineer, and first mate Roald Amundsen, who would later become a celebrated polar explorer.The author’s painfully insightful conclusion credits Kennedy with brilliant statesmanship but adds that most successors would have chosen war.

The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist (1900–45) collected his work from WWII in two bestselling volumes, this second published in 1944, a year before Pyle was killed by a sniper’s bullet on Okinawa. However, he needed at least their respect, which he sought by presenting himself as standard-bearer for Russian greatness and socialist revolution.Another area that historians have overlooked was events in the Atlantic Ocean – particularly concerning were four Soviet submarines, one carrying a nuclear warhead. However, once the crisis started both Khrushchev and Kennedy proved to be very level headed and rational actors.

Como qualquer povo que se liberta da opressão era inevitável que na enxurrada revolucionária tudo fosse questionado e reescrito. But more than this, his move was a ploy to counter the recent installation of US nuclear missiles in Turkey. Hastings’ account is balanced as he also examines the role of important Soviet officials including Defense Minister, Rodion Malinovsky who prepared the strategy to place missiles in Cuba; Anastas Mikoyan, the First Deputy of the Soviet Council of Ministers; Soviet Ambassador to the United States Anatoly Dobrynin; Alexandr Alekseev, the KGB station chief in Havana who had a close relationship with Castro; Andrei Gromyko, Minister of Foreign Affairs, and a number of others.Não deixa também de ser curioso que as vítimas, tanto as de há sessenta anos como as actuais são os adeptos mais aguerridos da resolução pelas armas. Max Hastings’s graphic new history tells the story from the viewpoints of national leaders, Russian officers, Cuban peasants, American pilots and British disarmers. Then, as now, it is not nuclear weapons that are dangerous, but the people who are in charge of them.